Speaking at the site of the shooting attack in Toulouse, France that has left three children and one adult dead, a local prosecutor told AFP that the gunman shot a man outside the school, initially using a 9-mm weapon. After it jammed, he switched to a .45-caliber weapon and he entered the school grounds, where “he shot at everything he could see, children and adults, and some children were chased into the school.”
The prosecutor also said that one person remains seriously wounded in the attack. Rabbi Yonatan Sandler and his sons Aryeh and Gavriel – all of the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood in Jerusalem – were identified as 3 of the victims of Monday’s shooting attack on the Ozar HaTorah Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday. Another victim, 8 year-old Miriam Monsonego, was the daughter of school principal Rabbi Yaacov Monsonego.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy called the shooting a “national tragedy” and said that he “cannot accept the massacre of children at a Jewish school.” Addressing rumors that this shooting is the third such attack by the same gunman, Sarkozy said: “We are struck by the similarities between the modus operandi of today’s drama and those last week even if we have to wait to have more elements from the police to confirm this hypothesis.” He said that a national manhunt for the perpetrator has begun, and insisted that “everything must be done so the killer is arrested.”
Due to the fact that the targets in the potentially-linked cases have been religious minorities, suspicions are mounting that the perpetrator is a far-right, anti-immigration, ‘lone gunman’ extremist, in the mold of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who perpetrated the attack in Norway in July 2011.